POLITICS: BOWING OUT;Big Budget, Early Start and the Candidate Are Figured in the Collapse of Gramm's Bid

A year ago, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas was assembling a campaign juggernaut. He declared for President before anyone else. He raised $4.1 million at a dinner in Dallas, one of the largest takes for a single campaign event in American political history. He spent a fortune winning dozens of straw polls, all nonbinding but all intended to bring an air of momentum and inevitability to Mr. Gramm's bid for the White House.

And while several big G.O.P. names like Kemp, Cheney, Quayle and Bennett skipped the race, bemoaning the logistical and gastrointestinal demands of the chicken-dinner circuit, Mr. Gramm said he just loved asking people for support.

But today, barely a week after voters started selecting actual delegates to the Republican convention, Mr. Gramm's $21.1 million offensive came to a screeching halt, in perhaps the most spectacular collapse of a Presidential campaign since Mr. Gramm's fellow Texan, John B. Connally, famously spent $12 million to capture one delegate to the 1980 Republican convention.

"When the voter speaks, I listen," Mr. Gramm said in Washington in withdrawing from the race today, two days after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses, "especially when the voter is saying someone else's name." But the Senator said he was not endorsing anyone today.

What went wrong in the Gramm campaign? Interviews with voters, and with political operatives in and out of the Gramm camp, point to a number of strategic missteps and an overarching conclusion that the campaign's organizational and fund-raising muscle, especially when boasted about by the candidate himself, backfired with the voters.

The strategic problems include a major failure to anticipate the serious and ultimately successful one-on-one challenge in last week's Louisiana caucuses from Patrick J. Buchanan -- "a tactical blunder of enormous proportions," said Senator John McCain of Arizona, Mr. Gramm's national chairman. Mr. Gramm also angered leading officials in Iowa and New Hampshire by backing other states' efforts to hold earlier primaries or caucuses.

And internal campaign memorandums suggest that even with ahuge budget for television commercials, Mr. Gramm had image problems with the voters.

"Thank God for the mute button," was one member of a New Hampshire focus group's response to an early spot featuring Mr. Gramm.

Of course, the most elemental conclusion remains that even when voters had ample opportunity to see Mr. Gramm's face and hear his voice, they did not cotton to the candidate.

The owlish, drawling Mr. Gramm delighted in telling audiences that his own wife's first reaction to him was "Yuck!" -- the real point being that in time, she came to discover his virtues and the American people would too. But voters spent far less time with him than Wendy Lee Gramm did.

"I don't think he could ever overcome the 'Yuck!' factor in this campaign," said Richard W. Murray, a political science professor and longtime Gramm observer at the University of Houston.

And another lesson of the Gramm campaign is that a huge financial war-chest will only bring a candidate so far, and can even amount to a turnoff. Mr. Gramm has probably lived to regret his eyebrow-raising remark to supporters at the glittering Dallas dinner: "Thanks to you, I have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics, and that's ready money."

The focus-group interviews, according to a September memo by a Gramm pollster named Linda DiVall, showed that a commercial trumpeting the Senator's successes to date actually made voters suspicious: "Iowa straw poll is meaningless," said one man, according to the memo. "It was bought."

Mr. Gramm said he would now concentrate on his re-election this fall. His negative ratings in Texas, however, are higher than either of the state's other leading Republicans -- Gov. George W. Bush and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison -- and several well-established Democrats are vying in a March primary for the right to challenge him in November.

Still, for the moment, Mr. Gramm and his top advisers are clearly assessing just what happened to the campaign. As his campaign manager in New Hampshire put it: "The strategy could have gone off like a rocket, but it was one of those things that didn't go. It didn't take off."

The basic strategy was to establish Mr. Gramm early on, in his words, as "the conservative alternative to Bob Dole." The fund raising helped to scare off some competitors and the straw polls were intended to show that Mr. Gramm was more viable than other candidates.

But he invested millions early on and in securing the victories in what were technically meaningless contests, Mr. Gramm ultimately seems to have set the bar needlessly high for expectations about his campaign. Rather than casting himself as an underdog and rising up, he declared himself the big dog early on and went downhill from there.

Even in Louisiana, where he could have portrayed the contest as a dogfight between himself and Mr. Buchanan, Mr. Gramm insisted up until the end that he would win and win huge; in losing, his campaign was all but finished, with no momentum going into Iowa.

In Iowa and New Hampshire, where voters and state leaders alike jealously guard their first-in-the-nation voting status on the road to the nomination, Mr. Gramm's decision to enter the Louisiana caucuses alienated some people. "I think Phil Gramm made a big mistake playing footsie with Louisiana," said Iowa's Governor, Terry E. Branstad.

Several top officials in Mr. Gramm's campaign argued today that many economic conservatives found Mr. Gramm appealing but still believed that it was Mr. Dole's turn for the Republican nomination, and that conservatives who were focused on social issues had been drawn to Mr. Buchanan.

"It's kind of a game where being a lot of people's second choice isn't enough," said Charles Black, Mr. Gramm's chief strategist. Speaking of religious conservatives in Louisiana and Iowa, he said: "In the end, they opted for the more fiery, passionate presentation of their views that Buchanan gives."

Still, Mr. Gramm's credentials with these conservatives may have been suspect all along; early on in the campaign, he was widely quoted as having said, in explaining that economic issues were paramount in his campaign, "I ain't running for preacher."

The post-mortems on his campaign will continue to address the issue of whether the real problem was the messenger or the message. While many Republicans said that Mr. Gramm was simply neither telegenic nor personally appealing to voters, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Christopher J. Dodd, wasted no time in arguing that the real failure in the campaign was that of the message.

"Phil, probably more than any candidate in this field, took the Gingrich new Congress program on the road," Mr. Dodd said today. "On the economic, conservative message of the Gingrich Congress and the Contract with America, it doesn't fly."

After losing Louisiana, aides said, Mr. Gramm fully realized that his campaign was probably doomed, but he decided to soldier on into Iowa, and he did so not without humor or panache.

At one point last weekend, just before getting off the bus in Davenport, he stood and thanked his workers and, apparently inspired by the company of Charlton Heston on the campaign trail, suddenly intoned a close approximation of Shakespearean dialogue, from the Battle of Agincourt, from "Henry V":

"Men abed in England will think themselves accursed they were not here with us," Senator Gramm said before hopping off the bus and plunging himself before the Iowans, "and hold their manhood cheap while any speak who fought with us on St. Crispin's day."